Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

I call to order this meeting of the Trouter Review Committee. It's just a brief announcement. It took us a few minutes to get the Zoom working from the room here, and now our TV screens are not visible to us, but fortunately I can see all the panelists on Zoom. So we will proceed. Let me bring up my roll call list here. Dawn.

Dawn Anderson here.

Nate. Mike. Angelina.

Here.

Skip. Skip told me he wouldn't be here. Bob De Toma. Here. Dan. Here. Mark.

Here.

Jeff.

Here.

Andy. Here. Jack. Here. Jim.

Here.

Greg. Here. Angela. No, Angela told me she wouldn't be able to make it. And Dave is here. So, yay, I've got 11 out of 15. That's more than enough for a quorum. It being summer, I won't be surprised. I'm not surprised by people sometimes having other summer plans. So, let us proceed. Where did I put my agenda? There. So, first... Item on the agenda is public input. So if anybody, I have to say this just as a formality. If anybody has any public input for this committee, now would be the time to raise your hand either in the room or on Zoom.

So I actually had someone reach out to me. It's a person I know here in town that serves on a board and a committee or board. He is on a board, the Traffic Safety Committee, I think it is, that their terms are for one year. And he said... You know, is there any way that we can make them standardized across all of the committees? And I don't know what the discussions have been before and why some are one year and council and aging is four years. Some are in the charter, a lot are in the bylaws, and the rest must be just from a vote that the select board took at one point in time when they created a committee or something, and that's what they made. And so it's, to me, after he said something to me, I looked it up and I saw that and I thought, well... It's very limited as far as what's in the charter, the terms on boards and committees. But maybe there's some way we could at least – I know there's going to be a bylaw review, but maybe there's a way to have a discussion of does it make sense to make them all pretty much standardized three years. And I don't know why some committees are one and the council on aging is four. That looked like the – parameters of what the committee terms were. But if there's a way that this committee can send a message to the select board and when the bylaw review committee gets started, maybe ask them to take a look at it too so that they're all standardized. His point was, you know, he just has been on it for a number of years and every year it has to go back in and get sworn in and all of that. And that would be just easier if he only had to do that every three years.

We'll make a note of that. Put it on our list of issues that have been It's raised to us and off the top of my head it's probably not a charter thing, but it is something that should be made known to various people. I remember in the bylaw committee we did some fixing of the terms the terms of office and the staggering of them for the Affordable Housing Trust. I think those are two-year terms, and I think that's by the state law.

Affordable Housing Trust is state law. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't see anything that says it's a one year. So there's a mention in the bylaws, but with no, no time. So that could probably just be changed as a policy.

Yes, I think it's the select board that makes, if I remember, is it either the select board or the town administrator? Town administrator. Yeah, so.

If I may, through the chair, as a part of one of our subcommittees, we're going to be going before the select board to ask for input, and we can bring this up when we go to them as a part of our findings.

Yeah. Cool. Anything else by way of public input? I don't have any attendees on Zoom.

Okay. What was the other one?

The Council on Aging, you said, was the... That's actually, I think, in the charter, the bylaws, that it's four years, which I thought was interesting. It is. I've never heard of it.

Four terms not to exceed four years. Interesting. From 7 to 11 registered voters of the town appointed by the select board for terms not to exceed four years. So the select board could make that three years if they wanted to.

Yeah, I think in general I would expect it.

Local cultural council, that statute is six years for them, right? I believe so. Could be.

Yeah, I think it's a good idea to have terms be consistent except when required otherwise or when there's a good reason for otherwise. All right, so that's public input. Next agenda I'm going to have is outreach. Any follow-up to our discussion last time on outreach? I think we talked about setting up for Grafton Day.

Yep. I confirmed and let Adam know that we're going to have a table, and I've been brainstorming. I'm going to borrow the wheel from Bob that we use at National Night Out and come up with a different type of table activity and just try to have some candy prizes. But that's as far as I've gotten. That is 21st. Yeah.

Are there any other outreach ideas that we want to talk about at the moment?

Did we want to do something at National Light Out? which I think is actually before the Grafton.

Yeah, first week of August. It's the first Tuesday in August. Weeks before.

We can have, if the lineup is going to be similar to you and Bob hosting, we can just do a kind of in-between PSA moment where you guys bring it up that it's being done. You can promote it live.

We don't need to do anything special.

No.

That's why I bring David on camera. That would be really special.

We can put it on our list of things to talk about.

We got you such a great job at that. I think this would be our last meeting before National Night Out, so.

Yeah. So we're all agreed that we'll do something for National Night Out. I was at the middle of summer already, almost. Oh well, anyway, yeah, anything else on outreach? If not, the next agenda item is to receive new suggestions for charter revisions, if any, other than what Jim brought to us as an issue. I guess properly that probably belonged in this agenda, Adam. Well, it was public input, so. Yeah. Well, it was. It was relaying to us input from the public. So that works. No new suggested revisions that anybody has come up with?

Nothing. We, in the next section, we'll talk about some other stuff.

Yeah.

So.

On to the next agenda item, updates from subcommittees. At our last meeting, we basically sent the subcommittees off to get to work. And so what we will do tonight and what we will do every meeting for some time now until the work is done, we'll ask each of the subcommittees If they have anything to report, and if so, what are they up to? Where are they at? I'm not expecting any finished results from anybody. But just, let's see.

Do you want to talk about three or do you want me to go through my notes?

I can talk about three. The Article 3, I realize we've been calling them sections and they're articles. It's not really a big deal because we all know what it is. But the Article 3 elected officials subcommittee just had our first meeting. The Section 2 subcommittee will have its first meeting next week. We got off to a very hot start. We talked about the planning board, what we'd like to do with them. I'm going to be conducting some research as to what other towns have changed to. And Mark and I will be attending a planning board meeting to get input from them. Talked about some redundancies that overlap between Section 3 and other sections. We talked about the change from town officers to town officials, seeing as the only town officer that was mentioned was the town clerk as an elected department head, and we don't have any more of those. So that can be removed. We also debated a recall procedure as it stands in the charter as of right now to... We never had a recall election, obviously, but if you wanted to start one, you'd need 100 signatures. And then in 30 days of them being certified, you'd need to gather 2,250 signatures, which is more than vote in the average election. So we determined that to be quite a lot. So we are looking at what other towns are doing. Mark is going to be leading that research and seeing what other towns do. are looking at. So Mark and I will be attending a select board meeting and planning board meeting in the future to get input. Dawn and I will attend a school committee meeting when they come back. And I will attend a board of library trustees meeting to get any of their input. We'll let them know ahead of time so we can get it on the agenda so they know that we're coming and they can be prepared. We talked about the select board, school committee, and board of library trustees being pretty good with the language they have now. So those will mostly just be kind of seeing where they are, if they do have any suggestions or any questions they want to ask. And we set our next meeting.

Point of information, we actually have had a recall election. It was, I'd have to look it up to remember the exact, it was in the Pretty sure it was the late 80s.

So there probably wasn't 15,000 registered voters in the 80s. No.

Population under 10,000, around 10,000 at that point.

And I know the original Charter Commission intentionally made it difficult to institute a recall.

15% is a high box.

It is perhaps. It may have been... a more appropriate bar at the time, 40 years ago or so. I wouldn't object to reconsidering that.

Somebody would really have to mess up mightily on an electric board for 2,250 people to sign a petition. Looking at you, Andy.

We talked about some of the research that I had done. Some of them do a percentage of the last municipal election or the last three municipal elections. Or one I found in particular does... the percentage of the number of people that voted in the election where that officer was elected to their current term so there's they're all over the place as far as options but most of them like the idea of going to be seeing what other towns are doing in this regard based on the discussion we had obviously this is the first time we met but we

like the idea of the average of the last three, because you're likely to get at least one that had a hot topic issue, one with a below average, and then one with an average. So, but first meeting.

Any other subcommittee reports?

I've been lax. Jim, we got to start the meeting. Yeah.

okay so so to date we've had we have the article two and article three subcommittees have gotten a start on their work or uh or are going to next tuesday we have the first and section two if i just take one more look at article two it does have 11 subsections but

Pretty much what I, and this is a great preview for Dawn, who is going to be there, is I'm going to go, okay, section 2-1. Dawn, what do you think of this one as town clerk? And she's going to go, that looks good. All right, on to the next one. And we'll go down and see what makes sense.

On our list of suggestions, we've had a I don't remember where I put it, and I won't bother to bring it up now. But there were, I think, a few that hit on Section 2, but not very many.

And most of the Section 2 suggestions are outside the scope of the charter. So we will take a look at that and see what can be worked in, what can't be. Yep.

So for Article 4, I just heard Mark say he was going to get in touch with Jim and Angelina and Nate and see if they can get something set up. No action yet on Article 1. Article 5, another Mark. Is that me, too? Skip, Bob, Don, and Mark. All right. Well, I'll give you a problem. Is that something that we would... And article six, again, Mark and Jim and Skip.

How many articles did I take?

What was I thinking? So four is account administrator, five is administrative organizations, and six is finance and fiscal.

You kept raising your hand. I did. You did.

Yeah, I mean.

I went to one subcommittee. You've got to give me credit. That's 25% of my work I did.

Yeah, I circulated the list of subcommittees in the meeting materials for this meeting. I will continue to just send it out as part of the meeting materials just as a reminder. Okay, so that's where we're at as of today with subcommittees. Subcommittees, some subcommittees have got something in motion. Great. Others, hopefully we'll hear more at our next month's meeting.

No, I won't be at the next meeting. There will be a lot for me in September. It's a good thing we've got two years for this.

I know. At our last meeting, we basically said we'd like to have all the subcommittees have completed their work by the end of the year.

Should have made a smaller time frame because that made, in my head, I'm thinking, I have plenty of time.

I think we started with a smaller one and said that wasn't feasible with summer people being away. So we expanded it.

We recognize that work tends to be slower during the summer. So we'll start cracking the whip in September.

Gotcha. Good. That's when we have our next meeting. I'll get on everybody's butt in September. Okay.

Okay. Is that it for subcommittee reports at the moment? Let's see. What else do I have on the agenda? Ah, yes. We need to approve the minutes of the previous meeting.

Move to approve the minutes as presented. Second.

Moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, let's put it to a vote. Dawn?

Aye.

Angelina?

Abstain.

Bob? Aye. I'll circle back to Bob. He seems to be otherwise occupied for the moment. Dan? Aye. Mark?

Aye.

Jeff? Aye. Andy? Aye. Jack? Aye. Jim? I'll abstain. I was absent. Greg? Aye. And Dave votes aye. Who's to return? We... I'll take it of all those present in the room or on Zoom, all were in favor except for two abstentions. So we'll take it as the motion is carried. The minutes are approved as drafted. And move to adjourn. Move to adjourn. Is there a second? I think I saw a second over there.

Yep.

All right. Motion to adjourn is not debatable. We'll call for the vote. Dawn?

Aye.

Angelina?

Aye.

Bob? Not present at the moment. Dan? Aye. Mark? Aye. Jeff? Aye. Andy? Aye. Jack? Aye. Jim? Aye. Greg? Aye. And Dave votes aye. Motion carried unanimously. We are adjourned.